MMO Archives - Page 203 of 442 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Lumu and Watcher Cat

February 6, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I did not do much in the way of gaming because I came home just mentally drained from work, and wound up logging in and out of various things while watching a couple movies. Instead unsurprisingly I am going to talk a bit about Monster Hunter World. This weekend I spent a significant amount of time upstairs playing it and am now in the Rotten Vale area of the map. Weirdly enough the main screen of the game still shows the Coral Highlands, but I do love how it occasionally changes to areas that you now have access to. At this point I have taken down Anjanath, Barroth, Great Girros, Great Jagras, Jyuratodus, Kulu-Ya-Ku, Paolumu, Pukei-Pukei, Radobaan, Tobi-Kadachi, and Tzitzi-Ya-Ku… which feels like a lot of Monsters but ultimately I think the grand scheme of thing I am barely progressed at all.

In fact after my last play session I believe I finally hit Hunter Rank 7 which is just a drop in the bucket compared to past Monster Hunter series games that capped out at like 999. There is an achievement for getting to Hunter Rank 100, so at the very least World goes that high but I have no clue how much higher it continues after that. Regardless… I am a babe in the woods when it comes to this game and nowhere near as far along as a good number of my friends. My play style is just way more meandering I believe than others… and weirdly enough after playing with Tam for a bit over the weekend he wins the bloodlust trophy for this game. He kept getting distracted during hunts by whatever happened to cross our path… whereas I seem to have a laser focus on the beast at hand often times ignoring collectibles long the way when I am in serious hunting mode.

Paolumu or “Lumu” as everyone seems to call it is legitimately one of the weirder hunts I have participated in. This crazy squirrel bat thing inflates an air bladder… and then uses it to bounce up and down on you for insane amounts of damage. I managed to rip it to shreds with my long sword and even managed to completely wreck its wings… which seemed to effect how well it could fly but not necessarily if it could fly. That was a completely different experience from when I fought Pukei-Pukei and somehow managed to actually ground that monster completely once its wings arrived at a similar tattered state.

Tam joined in the fight and got completely distracted for a little bit when Tzitzi-Ya-Ku crossed our path. The worst times were when we managed to be fighting Lulu and Tzitzi at the same time… and the stupid lizard would flash knocking us all out temporarily. Every time Tam would mount the back of Lumu it would end up subsequently taking off and flying away with him in which I wound up running after trying to sort out where it would land. That said when we got Lumu to a point where the wings were ripped and shredded it seemed unable to really go very far and mostly just flew around the area we were in at the time. Regardless… it was a goofy monster to fight and my strategy largely wound up with me trying desperately to hit is air bladder. I do not look forward to hunting them for fuzzy gear because at least with long sword they were super annoying to fight.

I feel like I need to talk about how inconvenient grouping is in this game. On Sunday afternoon we managed to get a four player group of AggroChat folks all together trying to do some of the low level stuff that Kodra needed since he started super late. The biggest problem we kept running into was the fact that in the grand scheme of things… what we wanted to do was just create an expedition and go off and hunt everything currently available in zone. However there really is no good way to do that… and functionally one of two things needs to happen. Firstly you can start a quest and after its completion just agree to stay in zone and return to camp instead of base. The second option is to have someone start an expedition and run and find a monster… allowing you to fire off a SOS beacon… and then hoping that all of the folks you actually intend to group with can find it in the cludgy join quest interface before someone random pops in.

This system just works counter intuitive to everything I expect from grouping in games. My brain works in a mindset of forming a group and then going off and doing a thing… not doing a thing and then hoping people can somehow join you after the thing has already started. We had a PSN chat session going and it would have been so much nicer if we could have simply invited that “fireteam” for lack of a better term to participate in something rather than having to time everything just so. Because grouping is so cumbersome… I largely spend most of my time roaming around the world by myself. After the challenge of trying to get all four of us together in the same group… I am maybe rethinking my decisions before to jump into random games and “help” people out. What if I was the fourth rando that ruined someone else’s attempts to play with the folks they had on voice chat at that moment?

The real victory of the weekend is that I managed to get high enough hunter rank to do the timed event needed to get the parts to craft my palico a watcher suit from Horizon Zero Dawn. I managed to get enough parts on the first outing to craft the suit itself, and I largely decided to ignore the weapon considering it was such a massive downgrade from what I was currently using. The watcher suit itself however has an insane amount of defense and as a result it has gone into my main rotation of palico gear. It does feel a little bit weird to see a watcher cat roaming around with me in the wilds because there are certain instincts I still have from playing Horizon Zero Dawn. At least I am not playing with a bow… otherwise I would potentially keep trying to shoot out my palico’s eye.

In the grand scheme of things I am still really enjoying this game and happy to be getting indoctrinated into the rich world of Monster Hunter. As a closing note… I’ve been seeing something weird happening in the Destiny YouTube and Twitch communities. There are so many of these Destiny-centric channels that have been essentially rededicating themselves to Monster Hunter instead. While this follows my own current evolution game time wise… considering I only actually played a single match this past Iron Banner, it does feel really odd to have my news sources for Destiny turning into a wall of Monster Hunter. On one hand it makes me happy… and on the other hand it makes me frustrated that the state of Destiny has reached a point where folks are abandoning it in droves. At the end of the day you have to play whatever it is that currently makes you happy, and I to have been almost entirely devoting myself to this weird and wonderful universe of Monster Hunter.

Flame Broiled Defeat

February 1, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I met my first real defeat in Monster Hunter World and completely failed a quest. That quest was me attempting to beat Anjanath in the Ancient Forest, which admittedly I am super happy I did the tracking work I already did for this mob in spite of what everyone has told me. I managed to find it super fast and now we get into the part of the show where I talk about my horrible ideas. I have thought this thing was serious business since the first moment I saw it… and as a result I went ahead and threw up a flare to see if anyone wanted to join me. Within moments I had a full party of people tasking on this monster and in the grand scheme I thought it was going pretty well… then I started noticing other players fainting. It was around or about this point that I remembered that you get four faints per party… not per person. So when I finally fainted myself… it happened to be the fourth one our party had gotten and the quest immediately failed out. In theory I should have just tried this on my own because I was managing to land some significant hits in on the big guy but I guess the truth is I just sorta like running with party tactics going on. I have been joining other folks quests and enjoying trying to learn how to play off of the strengths and weaknesses of the other weapons. Mostly I am wanting to learn how not to trip up other players with the Longsword which has been a problem that other people have reported with the weapon. As far as I could tell this was not actually happening because I tend to favor surgical strikes rather than just flailing away with R2 sweeping attacks. My goal for tonight is to seek revenge and down a flame breathing dinosaur.

My enjoyment of this series is way more focused on playing with my Palico than probably any other element. So much so that the first thing I do whenever I drop down on a map is find where the free roaming tailrider Palicos are and go get one. I love the sequence of events that happens when your Palico meets one out in the wild. They get together and then high five and cheer… and moments later you have a new friend following you around and helping you. This is literally the best part of monster hunter and the most purest joy I feel in the game. Last night I found a Palico wearing the Horizon Zero Dawn Watcher suit and I just about lost my mind. It too had the Pukei-Pukei bow equipped so it was an interesting combination of two mostly ranged characters helping me out. My weapon development is sort of stalled out at the moment because I am not exactly sure what I need to get the next ranks as I have been using the Bone Shotel III for a few nights now. I can in theory make an elemental version… but its base attack is slightly lower so for the moment I am sticking with what I have.

I will close out this mornings post with a video of one of the varied Monster Hunter World cooking sequences. I just cannot explain how happy the Palicos and the Felyne chefs make me. I find myself getting a meal cooked even when I am just going to go wandering around in the wastes doing nonsense for an hour completing bounties. There are a lot of people who lament the change in the cooking song, but I never knew the previous one so its not like I am missing anything particular. What I love is the completely over the top cooking sequence… which admittedly was also one of the things I loved about Final Fantasy XV so maybe I just like digitally rendered food? I’ve tried to play Generations again but find it particularly hard to control the game with my existing 3DS XL… which is still way too small for my tastes. As I have talked about in the past… I have large hands and a lot of controllers just feel awkward in them. I play PS4 with the Hori FPS Plus which itself is a way larger controller than the default PS4. It really makes me wish that Generations existed for the Switch because I think I could get into the game there knowing I had the option of playing docked if I want to… which admittedly I play switch docked 90% of the time. Side note… I consider the default Xbox One controller a little small as well and similarly have found an aftermarket alternative that I love in the form of the no longer made Power A Fusion Pro. Thankfully I have managed to pick up a couple of those… one for PC and one for Xbox One off Ebay for way cheaper than that Amazon listing.

Catfish Dargon

January 31, 2018 by Belghast

At least on some level I feel like I might be playing this game wrong. I’ve put a little over eleven hours into the game at this point and I am just now hunter rank 4. At this point I have managed to take down Great Jagras, Kulu-Ya-Ku, Pukei-Pukei, Barroth and Jyuratodus. Now some of those I have taken down multiple times like I keep farming Barroth for bits and pieces to craft gear and I have taken down Kulu several times just because killing the angry chicken is fun. Side note… hunting Kulu in Wildspire Wastes is so much easier than Ancient Forest because it doesn’t keep running away up into the canopy of the trees. My mission for last night was to farm some Barroth and attempt to get better gear… and another Monster Bone M which I did in both cases. I don’t have a full set of gear yet, but I did manage to upgrade two pieces of Barroth gear and one piece of Jyuratodus. It is around this point that I decided to start using the Samurai cosmetic armor because wearing Barroth armor makes you look like you are a walking rack of prime rib. Jyuratodus so far has been the most annoying thing I have fought to date because it cannot decide if it as a Catfish or a Dragon… so from now on it will simply be known as Catfish Dargon. I never really got to a point where I was in danger…. I just found it terribly annoying to fight because being in the water and mud is dumb and I never want to do that.

On my Palico front I now have Kenzie kitted out in a full set of Pukei-Pukei armor which seems to be working well. I am completely in love with my Palico, and it sorta makes me sad that in the above screenshot she ever doubts that I will be bringing her along on the next hunt. Side note… I have no clue if my Palico has a gender but in my head canon Kenzie the Cat is female so Kenzie the Palico is also female. I feel like I am improving at the game largely because of the continued shortening of time it takes me to hunt certain things. My first Barroth kill was a complete bear and I wound up firing an SoS flare because I had run completely out of mega potions. On kill number two at the beginning of last night I still struggled a bit, but never really got close to either fainting or running out of resources. On kill number three… it finally felt like I knew what I was doing and simply executed a sequence of attacks I had rehearsed over time. The other thing that I finally started getting the hang of last night was mounting the monsters and going into rodeo mode. I think more than anything that has probably sped up my process because when I finally knock them down I can get in a bunch of really powerful attacks. When I took down Kulu last night after my first ride the monster was already limping. So far all of the monsters have been challenging, but I feel fairly comfortable in my longsword abilities and it is mostly me just executing on the same things I have learned to this point… which I guess is maybe the point of the game?

I love the cheesy grin and weird uppercut pose on my guild card, so you are likely going to keep seeing it over and over. The biggest thing I am not quite grasping at this point is how the hell multiplayer actually works. My theory was that I could potentially hop in on quests that folks were doing in the game session I happened to be in. However when I click on a name everything seems to be grayed out. I have no clue how social connectivity is supposed to work in this game and I have no clue what throwing someone a guild card actually does but I keep receiving a bunch of them. Connecting with other people to play the game just feels way harder than it should be. It should be as simple as… is a friend of yours on… okay click to join their game and kill monsters together. Instead it feels like this weirdly contorted system that makes absolutely zero sense to my western brain. I keep thinking back to the madness of Final Fantasy XI and World Passes… and trying to place my mind into that sort of mindset because I just do not get it. If someone could explain to me like I am five how this system works… I would greatly appreciate it. I would love to be able to just hop in on someone else’s session and kill monsters because at this point I could give a shit about quest progression and just want more crafting bits. Based on what I heard from Grakulen last night apparently people can’t join me when I am in an expedition, which seems sorta broken. Regardless I am having a lot of fun in my own little sandbox… but sorta want to start learning how to group to take things down.

Lantern Light

January 25, 2018 by Belghast

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had originally intended. The initial goal I had in mind was to go home and attempt to pull myself back into a mindset where I could play Final Fantasy XIV. Instead I hit a few detours along the way the first of which being that shortly after I had finished doing all of the stuff that I need to do when I first get home… the power went out. Now I realize this is mostly an irrational fear, but the first thing that always goes through my head is… did you pay the bill? I am not sure exactly why I have this fear because we have never actually been disconnected from any utility, but it is still something that happens. I was already in my “not suitable for public” clothing, but I did stumble outside long enough to notice that all of my neighbors were also lumbering around by flashlight. I called in the outage and reported it through the menu driven system and then spent the next little bit trying to sort out how to see reported outages without logging into the damned electric company page with an account that I didn’t have. There is a local facebook group that serves as the closest thing we have to a city wide “water cooler” and my second place was to go check there knowing that there would already be a thread of a hundred or so posts about whatever was going on. The lights went out around 6 pm and if the group was to be believed the estimated time for the fix was 11:30 pm… which meant it was about to be a really long night living by lantern light. It was around this time that I remembered I had the Switch and grabbed it from my office settling into the sofa to play some games. I had played some Super Mario Odyssey and was about ten minutes into the Octopath Traveler demo when the power was magically restored at roughly 8 pm.

From there I did all of those things I had been avoiding… like opening the fridge to get a drink and settled down to play some Final Fantasy XIV. Upon logging in I got greeted by friends… roamed around Limsa Lominsa and then promptly logged out because I just did not have it in me to do the group activities I need to do in order to make any semblance of forward momentum. Instead I popped into Elder Scrolls Online and continued work on Stonefalls. This zone is like a giant immovable object for me and the sooner I get on the other side of it the better. It has singlehandedly killed every attempt at playing an Ebonheart Pact character because even though it has gone through a ton of changes since alpha… it still is not what I would call a good zone. The weird shape and geometry of the zone makes everything a bigger chore than it should be. Objectives that might look really close on the map instead require you to backtrack half the way across the zone to find the proper entrance into the region you need to go. All of this is just the functional reasons… but there is also the fact that it is bleak. The quake color palette and the constant smokey haze and falling ash make it not exactly the most visually exciting place to be. I did however feel like I made a bunch of progress in the zone last night and checked off a bunch of areas. I am not even sure where I am in the zones main story quest, and if I could change one thing about Elder Scrolls online I would make it so that those primary quests required to move to the next area were somehow highlighted differently in a FFXIV style manner.

The other thing on my radar is that at the time of taking this screenshot we were roughly 17 hours away from unlocking Monster Hunter World on the PS4. Granted I have no actual intent of staying up until midnight to play this game, but I do plan on playing Friday night. This is going to be my first real attempt at playing a Monster Hunter title while it is in the public zeitgeist and I am hoping that by doing so… I will be able to grok what the fuck is going on. I’ve attempted the PS Vita version and purchase Generations for the 3DS… but largely chocked up a lot of my problems to the fact that I am just not much of a handheld gamer. World however is coming to the PS4 which will allow me to play it on this nifty 43 inch 4k television (even though I don’t have a pro and can’t do the higher resolutions really) and my hope is it will be a much more compelling experience. I’ve always thought this was the sort of game I could get into if I had the proper introduction, because the core loop of grind random stuff to make yourself stronger to take down big bad monsters is one that I can likely get behind. I am hoping I can rely on those who have come before like Ashgar and Stormrazor to get me over the adjustment hump. I am also super excited that Arekkz is devoting a series of videos to easing beginners in. I most definitely need the assistance. Needless to say I will be on the PS4 giving it a whirl tomorrow.